Warm Drag - Warm Drag

Warm Drag are Paul Quattrone, of Thee Oh Sees and !!! and singer, Vashti Windish, both from L.A. Windish is a vocalist of some prowess and sex appeal, and were she required to stomp and holler behind some thrashing rock n roll outfit, you know she could pull it off. Instead, she adopts a swaggering tone across sedative, sometimes hypnotic, but also often abrasive industrial noise. Raunchy, engaging vocals estranged from the sometimes overbearing clamour of numerous pedals, samplers, dub machines and screeching guitar. The latter is sometimes used to powerful effect, as on ‘Cave Crawl’ where the hissing, cussing and spluttering guitar cuts in and out like some bedeviled interruption to the meditative sounds of Windish.

Frankly, it’s all extremely impressive if not a tad frigid and coolly detached. If you come at it from the perspective of a DJ mix, it makes a lot more sense than perceiving it as a rock album. For me, this is like remixed Jennifer Herrema and Neil Hagerty, but with an industrial knife’s edge, resulting in a boorish pig of an album. One you wish would occasionally regale itself for being so fucking cool.

To make things clear, there are moments of sheer brilliance here, such as on ‘End Times’ a warped and bleary chronicle of the young and disenchanted navigating an overstimulated, tech-driven society. This track utilises a Jamaican sound system which pumps out some conspicuous bass lines, over which some vaguely eastern modal thing and vocal loops of a moaning woman clash in some kind of religiosity I can’t articulate. Then ‘No Body’ delivers the mantra “I just wanna be nobody” and the level of disengagement is more than purely physical.